ERP Plus for Mill Processing
Mill Processing is one of the more unique niche verticals within the metals industry. The units of production change constantly, the material changes form dramatically and the ability to track and manage inventory can be elusive. Verticent has a long history of serving the needs of mill processors, be they tube mills, roll forming mills, wire mills, flat rolled steel mills, foundries or forging companies. That history has resulted in a business system that possesses industry leading capabilities to make operations run more effectively and at a reduced cost.
Mill processing begins with quoting and order entry and within ERP Plus, we offer a dynamic product configurator to capture the specific attributes and characteristics from the customer. ERP Plus then develops a material list and details routing based upon those customer specifications. ERP Plus supports a variety of costing and pricing methodologies and provides detailed quote and sales order margin analysis for both raw material and for each production operation. Markups can be managed at the raw material or finished goods level and optionally can be managed on each operation.
ERP Plus includes a material optimizer that selects and allocates raw material based upon generating the least amount of scrap. This capability ensures the most optimal use of inventory and also provides excellent material genealogy.
Raw material chemical and physical characteristics are managed at the tag or heat level and upstream and downstream usage analytics are always available. Mill Test Reports and Material Certifications are built-in to ERP Plus and can be delivered automatically with various customer facing documents.
From a mill run scheduling perspective, ERP Plus is very capable and provides numerous user-friendly methods to schedule and report mill production activity. There are generally two ways that mills manage their schedules. First is the true “make to order” scenario where you base your production off of actual demand. The second is more of a rolling schedule sometimes called a cycle schedule. In this scenario, companies predefine the rollings for the week and then publish that rolling schedule to their customers. Companies can then solicit orders to consume capacity within the rolling schedule. Often times, mills may have a mixture of make to order and rolling schedule. In all of these scenarios, Verticent has developed scheduling features within ERP Plus to make sure that production is scheduled efficiently and that production reporting occurs with a minimal amount of human intervention.
ERP Plus includes a finite scheduling feature that gives a true capable to promise date based upon available material, equipment and resources. ERP Plus also features a powerful workbench to manage and communicate the mill runs and always maintains excellent history for use in future planning of mill run operations.
There are also features available within ERP Plus that address the specific needs of each type of mill. For example, tube mill production companies have a large amount of functionality specifically designed to assist with managing and optimizing their coil inventory. Whether you purchase pre-slit coils, slit them yourselves or you purchase master coils from mills and have those slit at a 3rd party slitting house, ERP Plus offers deep coil processing functionality to schedule, setup, produce and analyze coil slitting as a pre-cursor to the tube manufacturing.
Production Reporting can be done with just a few mouse clicks or keystrokes or can be accomplished through data collection input. Many ERP Plus customers have integrated their AMS controllers to report production results from say a roll forming machine directly into ERP Plus. This is facilitated through the ERP Plus .NET integration module that seamlessly ties together external solutions with ERP Plus.
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